by Zeller, Jill
Sawyer glanced at me. We lay side by side on the front couch, staring through the louvered windows into a gray nothing. “Gilgamesh?” he asked. I nodded.
This time Sawyer took my hand. “We are going to save them, Annie. I know we are.”
I couldn’t answer. No matter how fine and trim the Bijou Xtra made me feel, I could not share Sawyer’s hope and resolve. All I could think about was what I was going to do to Dominique if anything happened to Zoe.
It must have been only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours before I felt the flying trailer finally begin to descend. We banked over the City; quivering colors, lopsided drunken buildings, even smells of icy air and sweet ghost breath, felt like home.
I heard Sawyer draw in a breath at the view. The City was far larger than I imagined, or perhaps it was simply growing, spreading like fungi over Hell’s gray skin. No horizon offered relief to the eye, just unimaginable vastness pushing ever onward into the milkshake sky. Row upon row of dwellings, bumps of domes, needle steeples. Multiple stairways arcing upward, disappearing into the milk-mist.
Realizing to late that I hadn’t specified the destination, I was relieved to see that Jonah had anticipated me. We sailed into the square across the way from Dad’s laboratory. But I was appalled at what I saw from above as we circled.
In the place where the old classical bank-style building once resided was a smoldering heap of rubble. Fumes spiraled to the sky from it, as if whatever had happened here had happened not too long ago. My heart plummeted into my feet. Getting to my knees I peered down, trying to make out something recognizable, shelves, windows, even the table where Dad had stored the Bijou he kept from me. I could make out nothing. All was incinerated thoroughly into black cinders.
Pepper, lying beside me, whined. As we descended, I thought she must be picking up Dad’s scent. Perhaps he had just been here. Perhaps he had blown up his own lab.
But what if someone else had done this? Here I was, his hapless daughter, bringing a lab straight into the arms of his enemies, whoever they might be. We were very close to landing now. Ghosts encamped below scattered, knocking down tents and tarps. We came to a bumpy rest just across the lane from the ruined building. At the door, Pepper scratched. I let her out, grabbed my bike, Sawyer right behind.
I had almost forgotten the wraiths. They had followed, of course, even though their Bijou, which I had found at Dominique’s house, had been left back in the land of the living.
The air smelled chill and smoky. Fires in Hell smell the same, I thought as I looked across the scorched patch hemmed in by untouched, unharmed structures. A surgical strike. I again wondered at the source and motive. Had Dad torched the place himself?
Ghosts gathered around us, giving a wide berth to the Harpies. Maybe it was the Bijou coursing through me, but they looked alive, fleshed out, less like clowns and masked freaks, more human. They said nothing, of course, and Sawyer, who had so far seemed to have accepted that he had entered the universe of the insane, stared back at them almost angrily, as a celebrity might at paparazzi.
But even more unsettling, Jonah and Mae also looked more real. I couldn’t take my eyes off my ex-husband and best friend, Jonah hunched in his leather jacket, Mae elegant in lacy black. I wanted to touch them, feel the warmth of blood in skin, but I knew that was not what I would get.
Hollis, however, was indescribable. Ghosts avoided him, too, as he stood near us. He took on the look of a tattooed man. To the eye’s relief the rivulets of color running through his skin stilled and solidified into an irregular mosaic.
There was nothing to be gained by staying here. Pepper whined, circled, waiting for a sign from me to start the hunt. Everyone gazed at me now.
I needed a plan. I thought I had one, but my father ran interference. I looked at Sam. Ruffling her feathers, and gently stretching her wings, she waited.
“Sam, would you get aloft? Tell us what you see as we go?”
Giving me a nod, she spread her wings wide, knocking down several ghosts who had strayed too close, and rose in a rush of rose-scented wind and the sharp snap of feathers. Wraiths moving among the ghosts were blown aside. Mae’s hair and gown fluttered like shredded flags. We all braced ourselves to watch Sam ascend into the milky mists above.
Leaning close to Pepper, I whispered, “Go!”
She bounded through the crowd, knocking aside ghosts not quick enough to leap out of the way, leading us directly across the square. Sawyer and I mounted our bikes and followed, Mae, Jonah and Hollis trailing.
Pepper galloped into an alley flanked by two tall buildings joined at the third story by a passageway. I went first, then Sawyer. Around me wraiths crowded, flowing in clots of gray vapor. The ground beneath me was bumpy with cobbles; as we went, the bicycle tires changed shape from slim racer to stubby fat. Glancing back, I saw that Sawyer’s tires had undergone the same change, but I wasn’t sure he noticed. He pedaled behind me with a grim smile, chilling and intent.
We burst into another square, empty of all movement, but it rolled in hillocks coated in multicolored grasses. My bike gave me more gears, shifted by itself; we crossed that square in record speed. Glancing back again, I saw thousands of ghosts issuing from the alley, following. I didn’t know whether to rejoice or curse about the size of my rag tag army of the dead.
The ground began to rise. I hadn’t before noticed any real hills in Phantom City in all my visits, but it was as if a cone had risen in the very heart of town, like a big pimple; on its slopes clung multicolored dwellings and crevassed roadways. Pepper followed a switch-backing road of potholes and cracks. After several minutes of this, the bicycles became useless. Sawyer abandoned his first with a muttered curse, and dashed past me on foot as I tried to maneuver mine around a ragged ditch.
Seeing he had the right idea, I let my bike fall, gave it a silent thank you, and began to run. My legs worked like steel, and my breath came easily, thanks to Hollis’s Bijou. Even faster and more agile, Sawyer opened the gap between us, using his hands and knees as the path grew ever steeper.
“Mommy!”
I froze, stumbled, jammed my knee into a broken spear of granite. “Zoe?”
Silence, broken only by the rush of Harpy wings above, and Sawyer’s grunting as he pushed upward over jumbled rubble of colored stone. “Zoe, I’m coming!” I shouted.
A black shadow buzzed past me, followed by a whiff of smoke. Jonah flew upward, zigzagging around jagged structures leaning at impossible angles. Struggling to my feet, the pain vanished from my knee as if it had never happened. I had no time to wonder or look, but powered on. Sawyer was out of sight above me.
Broken buildings blocked my view; I couldn’t see where Zoe had shouted from. A sweet wind pushed at me as Sam hovered above, wings quivering as she held her place in the air. “Not far. I can see them inside a place surrounded by a high wall. This height continues to rise.” She shook her head of lovely red curls. “Soon it will be too high for me to fly to.”
I nodded my thanks, and continued upward. Boards, boulders, piles of fine sand bared my way, but I leaped over them, climbed like a monkey, sprinted along the edges of shattered walls. As I teetered on the edges of destruction, I caught a glimpse of Sawyer far above me, and above him, a great white curving wall.
The wall gave off a brilliant gleam, too bright to look at without serious pain. It seemed to be without blemish, as if fashioned of mirrors. Inside this place was my daughter, and my nephew, and Sawyer’s daughter. I would find a way in if I had to dig underneath, or grow wings to fly over.
Skidding to a halt, balancing on a window frame sprouting from a scree of rough gravel, I waved frantically to Sam, who was now circling the rising cone. Below, hundreds of feet down, my army of ghosts ringed the rising mountain, a giant mosaic of shifting colors, interspersed with a gray glue of wraiths.
I put my fingers into my mouth and whistled. Screeches and screams floated up to me from the sea of ghosts. Sam shifted her course, folded her wings, and
arrowed to me through the thickening mists.
She landed on a peaked roof, her talons piercing the tiles. Scrambling to her, I shouted, “Can you get me over the wall.”
Sam looked up. The edges of the wall now vanished into the milky mists of Hell’s heavens. Roiling dark stars appeared large and close, emitting a humming noise, deep and rumbling, like that of huge power lines. “I can try. But we’ll have to hurry.”
Before I could even shift my feet, she lifted off and scooped me up with one talon. They felt like dragon scales must feel, soft as snakes, but firmly wrapped around me. As she rose, I looked at the claws at the end of each talon, sharp as razors, and was glad I was not a mouse or an elephant and she was hungry.
She strained to fly upward, angling to one side and taking a spiral course around the cone. We were thousands of feet higher than the plain below. I could glimpse the City borders, a distant row of cliffs, three of the five rivers of Hell. Not a mile from the City, Cocytys foamed and moaned, beyond I could see the dark smudge of the Wood. Farther, and to the right of the lamenting river Cocytys, was a dark heavy black snake of a river, wide and deep: the River Styx, with its black waters of loathing.
To the right of this, in the far distance, I knew what river lay there, even though I could not see it. Vertical lines of smoke wavered upward like black fingers over the River Phlegethon, the Fiery. The other two, Acheron, River of Sorrow and finally Lethe, stream of dreamless sleep, were somewhere too far for human eyes to see.
Sam strained to lift me. We had reached mid level of the wall. I caught a glimpse of Sawyer leaping up a pile of brick and rock, but he was soon out of sight as we circled the compound. I could hear Sam grunt as she pushed herself higher. If anything as we neared the ceiling of milky sky, the air seemed grainier, rather than thinner as it would in the Land of the Living. I could feel the barest tingle of little particles hitting my cheeks.
“I can’t do it.” Sam’s voice was breathless. Her wing flaps slowed.
“Yes, you can,” I urged. “You must. Just a little higher. Just get me to the rim.”
Saving her breath for flying, Sam gave a mighty flap, the sound of her wings as sharp as the slap of oars on water or the snap of sheets in a brisk wind. The top of the wall was a matter of feet above me. I could jump from here, I thought, if I had something to stand on.
“Stop struggling!” Sam bit the words at me. I supposed she was worried I would fall from her grasp. As the wall had grown even higher, maybe seventy feet, I knew hitting the ground from here would not feel good; even if I survived the fall, I would be impaled on a steeple end or the spikes on the top of an iron fence.
My heart refused to give up. I would will this Harpy to get me in there. I had heard Zoe call out to me and I was not going to give up.
Ignoring Sam’s demand that I stay still, I shifted to get my foot on the hooked part of her talon below me. This time, to my relief, she ignored me, concentrating all her effort on getting ever higher. I didn’t dare look down to see how high we had gotten.
The edge of the blinding white wall was very near, but the bobbing motion of each of Sam’s wing-strokes would send me too low again. I would have to time my leap to the apex of each wing beat, when we were at our highest. She didn’t seem to be able to gain any more height, and her breaths came sharp and wheezy. I began to count the intervals between each rise and fall.
We circled the wall rim. I would have to go now, or lose my chance. My hands grew damp, and my heart thundered in my ears. I could die in Hell as easily back on Earth. And Zoe would have no one to protect her.
With that, without even timing myself, I slid between two of Sam’s toes and launched myself into space. Grit speared my eyes, blinding me even worse than the blaring light from the wall beneath me.
I slammed against the wall. My hands gripped the edge, but the surface was smooth as glass and they slipped, fingernails dragging helplessly down the surface. I felt myself sliding earthward, no hell-ward, and I must have screamed, but I could hear nothing except the growling hum of black stars, now level with me as the tip of the wall rose into the fogs of hell’s sky.
I was going to die. I would slide to the bottom and Zoe would have nobody to help her. “Goddammit!” How could I have been so stupid? All of this for nothing?
Something bumped me, something soft and purring. Then another, and another. Blindly I reached out and my hands dove deep into a tingling, quivering substance. I held on.
The thing dragged me at a dizzying pace along the wall surface. It was like being pulled across the surface of ice by a fuzzy bear, but the ice was warm and the bear was skating. Around me the rumbling roar bored into my skull, threatening to shuffle my brain and re-deal for a new game. Another object brushed my legs. It swept upward, toward the wall-rim somewhere up above me. Seizing this one, transferred to it as it dragged me skyward, toward the rim, and I could see as we got closer that I was in a pinball game of the black stars, bumping and pushing as the cone penetrated the sky.
My star catapulted over the edge, moving ever fast like a pebble from a sling shot, and took me out over the interior of the compound. The milky mist obscured my view of what was below. The star hurtled toward the opposite edge. No other stars were close enough to grab.
I made my choice. I let go of my star, and hell’s gravity seized me in its jaws.
Chapter Thirty-One
Soul-sucker
I was in my room, not the Indian-bedspread palace Jonah and I had shared, but my room, my old bedroom at home. Lavender walls, Barbie house I had dismantled and remodeled, rocking chair I painted red and black, cloying odor of Opium, cologne my mother once loved, that I had spilled behind my desk and could never, no matter how much washing or incense I burned, eliminate. Ivy said my room smelled like a brothel.
Damn, Ivy had promised to take me to the mall. I shot out of bed, ran through the door, pounded on Ivy’s, Get up get up, you lazy. You’re supposed to take me to the mall.
No answer. Opening the door, pushing it open wide, I saw the sheets of her empty bed spilling to the floor. The window she climbed through was closed. She always closed it when she left.
“Ditched again, huh?” Dominique’s voice behind me, soft, needling. How did she get in here?
Whirling around, I came at her, furious. Furious at Ivy for abandoning me again and again, especially after my mother died and Dad said you have to watch out for Annie. You have to take care of her.
Raising my hand, I slapped Dominique across the face, but my hand swept through empty air. Alone, in Ivy’s room, on the Persian carpet her mother, not my mother, had left her when she died, velvet under my feet. Ivy never took care of the rug. It was always dirty, bits of grit dug into my heel.
“Always a bit late, aren’t you? For everything.” Dominique still spoke to me, but now I couldn’t see her. I dashed down the hall, thundered down the stairs; brilliant sunshine streamed in through the living room windows. Outside, a pasture spread across mild rises to the fence marking the cemetery. Mae was buried there, in that cemetery.
Wait a minute. I shivered, shook my head and rubbed my eyes. You didn’t know Mae and Dominique the day Ivy was supposed to take you to the mall. You didn’t meet them until 3 years later.
A cold bar of steel went through me, top to bottom. Cold and trying to scare me, but it was steel. I could use that steel right now. Hollis’s Bijou gave me steel. I turned around, breathing deeply, and the bright room faded, as if clouds drove overhead. I could hear the faint buzzing of the black stars now, and shadows raced across the floor.
Rents scored the fabric of the couch and the matching chairs near the window; between them dust furred the pedestal table-top. The smell of mold rose into my nostrils. Another time jump; it was my past, this time, not someone else’s.
But that wasn’t right. I stood in the old Novak house, alright, but the house had taken a walk on the wild side, run to Hell, so to speak. Outside, the Hell-sky ruled the weather. Inside, time did its bit
to hurry age and destruction.
“Do you want to see Zoe?”
I spun around. Dominique stood in the entry; directly behind her was Dad. Over his shoulder I could see the stairs running up to the second story; along its walls, photographs, me, Ivy. Other Novak relations. But something wasn’t right. Some of the portraits were missing.
“Where is she?” I forced myself to remain where I was, even though my fingers itched almost painfully, wanting to scratch deep scars in Dom’s perfect skin.
“Downstairs. Why don’t you come down?”
“It’s OK, Annie,” Dad began slowly.
“Shut up, Frederick.” Dom turned sideways, her white hand flowing in the grayness toward the cellar stairs. “Downstairs. She wants to see you, Annie. So badly. It’s a shame you took so long to get here.”
Moving closer, without a choice about it because she and Dad still partially blocked the opening from the living room, I kept my gaze on Dom. As I got closer, I could sense a vague distress, anger or frustration, in the way Dom stood, around the edges of her words. She wore perfectly-creased gray wool slacks, a shirt the color of charcoal. Her hair was down, ran onto her shoulders like an over-sized drape. But there was something about her mouth, like she was hungry and fighting it, lips dry and tongue slavering. I understood then, as I walked past her, that she had not expected me to be here. That she thought I would never find her and now she was angry because she was afraid.
This idea of seeing Zoe in the cellar was a trap but I didn’t care. I needed to see that my daughter was OK. As I brushed past Dad, my elbow glided through his arm. He’d stuck his hands in his lab coat pocket and his elbows stuck out. Hair silver like sun on sea, skin the color of the sand, he watched me. Did he look a bit sad? Guilty maybe?
I walked to the cellar door, laid my hand on the handle. Dom and Dad hadn’t moved from their positions near the living room entry. Past them, I could see through the cut-glass of the front door, a shifting shadowy light—the inside of this glass pyramid or what ever it was.